


may love lie around you, good fortune surround you

by Chash



Category: The 100 (TV) RPF
Genre: F/M, whoops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-06
Updated: 2015-11-06
Packaged: 2018-04-29 19:56:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5140571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chash/pseuds/Chash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The 100 ends, and Bob disappears for three months and reappears with an alpaca farm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	may love lie around you, good fortune surround you

**Author's Note:**

> You never forget how to write RPF, just like riding a vaguely creepy bicycle.

"You know," she says, looking around the property with a critical eye. "I've been telling everyone you _haven't_ completely lost it."

His smile is broad and white, and she's _missed him_. It's completely unfair, that this is the first time she's seen him since the we-got-canceled party. She's gone hiking with Marie, even though she hates hiking, lost miserably at video games against Ricky, Richard, and Sachin, and jammed with Christopher, and when she asked all of them if they'd seen Bob, she got the same answer: not since the party.

It should have maybe made her feel better, that she wasn't being singled out our anything, but--well, she still wasn't seeing him. And every time she texted to try to set something up, he'd say he was busy or sick or out of town, and, yeah, it sucked. And she almost didn't come when he texted _Got a new place, come see_ and an address in the middle of fucking nowhere, just because fuck him, right?

But here she is. She missed him. And she was curious.

"Why are you telling them that?" he asks, still smiling. "And what are you basing it on?"

"General optimism. What _is_ this?"

"This, my dear Eliza, is a farm. My farm."

"You bought a farm." She isn't sure what to do for a minute, torn between laughing and shaking him and just--complete and utter confusion. "What are you farming?"

"I've got some alpacas," he says. "So, wool, I guess? And I want to learn carpentry, maybe. Make furniture. I could sell furniture, right?"

"You know you have a job," she says, but--he doesn't right now, not really. Eliza thinks of Bob as an actor, the same way she thinks of herself as one. That's his job; it's what he _does_. But he doesn't have anything new booked, didn't go straight from the end of the fourth season into an indie movie like she did. She doesn't blame him for wanting a break, but there's a difference between _taking some time off_ and _buying a farm and livestock_. 

Still, he's looking nervous, almost hurt, and even if she's a little hurt too, that he did all this alone, that he never even told her he was thinking of it, she can't bring herself to be cross with him. Being angry with Bob Morley is like kicking a puppy.

"But it's nice," she says. "Why don't you show me around?"

*

The thing is, Eliza worries about Bob, for all he's five years older than she is and theoretically capable of taking care of himself. She knew he wasn't cut out for a lot of parts of his career, and it makes her furious, because he's such a good actor and he loves it, and if acting was all he ever had to do, he'd be so happy. But there are so many things that go along with it that he hates, and she'd been planning, absently, to keep helping him out, the same way she was sure Ricky and Richard would.

Instead, he's got a farm, and some alpacas that all seem to want to eat her coat, and if he has any plan of ever going back to acting, he doesn't mention it.

It doesn't mean she's going to stop looking after him, of course. It just means her tactics will have to change.

*

Ricky has picked up a recurring role on _Jane the Virgin_ , which is honestly kind of perfect for him. He gets to be completely over the top and use his real accent during scenes when he isn't undercover as--whatever he is. He's not even sure where his character arc is going, but he loves it.

Unfortunately, the show films in California, which means he's not around Vancouver nearly as much as he used to be, and much less useful, as her go-to person to check on Bob when she can't.

"Has Ricky been up yet?" she asks, on her third visit to the alpaca farm. She's been telling him to name it, because farms have names, but he claims he's waiting for inspiration. Eliza takes this to mean he's reading a lot and when he comes across a name he likes, he'll use it.

"No." He pauses and adds, "I haven't told anyone but you yet. And Ricky's busy."

The last lingering traces of resentment that he hadn't told her about his farm plan fade as she realizes he didn't tell _anyone_ , and he told her first.

"You know he wants to see you," she says. "He's back every other weekend." And he's moved from (she assumes) texting and calling and attempting to video chat to actually calling Bob out on Twitter, so it's only a matter of time before he figures out how to put a trace on his cell or hires a private detective.

He scratches one of the alpacas behind the ears, absent. "You haven't tried to talk me out of this," he remarks.

"I assumed that was why you didn't tell me. So I wouldn't try to."

"No," he says, sounding surprised. "That's not why." He runs his hand through his hair. He cut it at some point in the last three months, short enough to take out the curl, but it's coming back a little. "You know you're my biggest fan, aside from my mum. I didn't know how to tell you. I thought you'd be disappointed."

It doesn't sound like all, but he closes his mouth, firm, like he's keeping himself from saying any more.

"What did you tell your mum?"

He smiles. "Well, that was easy. I told her I wasn't happy."

"You could have told me that too. All of us. You could have told _Ricky_ ," she adds, because she's not sure there's anything he could say that would make Ricky stop loving him. You get Ricky for life.

"I'm going to. But he's busy. You are too."

She is, but not _busy_. Not like she was. She's got a guest spot on iZombie that might go to series regular, and she's been picking up other roles in Vancouver when she gets the chance. It's work, but it's not like being Clarke Griffin was.

But she's not stupid. She knows how it is. You do a show--especially a show where you're in the main cast, where you're the _leads_ , and you get close to people, and then it wraps, and it gets harder and harder to stay in touch. It's hard to keep seeing people, when someone's going off to LA and someone else is trying to make it in film, and someone else is--

Someone else is just quitting. And he knows as well as she does those are the people it's hardest to stay in touch with.

"I'm starting a vine series about your alpacas," she declares. "Six-second alpaca soap opera. It's going to be a thing. So if you don't tell Ricky, he's going to find out from vine. Friends don't let friends find out they bought an alpaca farm from vine, Bob."

"I'll call him," he promises, with a small smile. "Six-second alpaca soap opera?"

"It's going to be a thing," she repeats, and bumps her shoulder against his.

*

Ricky takes point on what he calls _Operation We Still Love Bob_ , for which Eliza is grateful. Ricky is the kind of friend who just _is_ , who will love you forever, once he loves you in the first place. Bob could disappear for four years and come back with a drug addiction and three illegitimate children and a lower-back tattoo that says "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" and Ricky would just buy a Baby Bjorn and start calling himself Uncle Ricky.

Eliza doesn't know how to love people like that, so unselfishly. She wouldn't have stopped loving him any more than Ricky had, but she wouldn't be able to keep back her resentment, either. 

And that's the problem; Ricky can set up shifts of people to go out to the farm and hang out with Bob, sending Richard, who complains that he just has a Super Nintendo set up and is playing weird old games no one cares about but keeps going back, and Christopher, who loves it because the 3G is bad and the wifi is worse, so he and Bob just sit around reading and not talking to each other, and Marie, who wanders the farm like a lovely pioneering goatherd out of classic Canadian literature, but Eliza doesn't know how to be that friend for him.

She goes when she's mostly sure no one else is there, makes stupid vines that follow the basic plot of Jane the Virgin mixed with what she remembers of her run on Neighbors, and whatever she can make Bob tell her about his run, which is not much. She watches him trying to figure out how to make chairs using YouTube videos and tries to figure out how she can convince him she'll be back as much as she can. How to stop feeling vaguely angry that he thinks she's going to just leave him behind.

"You can talk about work, you know," he says. He's sanding down wood, and she's not watching the flex of his arms. She's really not. "You never do. Have they bumped you up to regular yet?"

"Not yet."

"Movies?"

"I've got a week-long thing in LA next month. Nothing big, but the buzz is good. It's not going to get me name recognition, but it might open the door for more things."

His smile is real. "I'm glad."

He's probably her biggest fan too, outside of her family. It's the way you get with someone you work with a lot; you can have all the weirdly over-invested fans in the world, but it's hard to really appreciate, from the outside, just how hard everyone works.

"Ricky's coming up next weekend, I have a thing."

"You know you don't actually need to have shifts on me. I can be left by myself."

"It's not for you, it's for the alpacas. You're fine, but they need more human contact."

"Do you actually have a schedule drawn up for when you come down, or did that feel like overkill?" he asks, ignoring her.

"I just come as much as I can," she says, and he looks at her sharply. "I like it out here," she adds, managing to sound casual.

He snorts. "You hate nature."

"I'm getting used to it."

*

She gets a real movie over hiatus, a month in LA filming and feeling, if not like a _movie star_ , then at least how she thought being an actress would be. She gets lunch with her friends in the city on weekends and a few people stop her for pictures and autographs, and the movie is _good_.

It feels like the first step toward the life she wanted, and she misses fucking Vancouver.

Vancouver, yeah.

*

Eliza really _does_ like TV.

"It's nice, you know? It's like--I get to grow the part." She grins. "Of course you know. Are you still writing Bellamy Blake fanfiction?"

Bob's scowl is half-hearted, and it just makes her grin wider. "Is that why you're still doing your alpaca show? Because you're growing the characters?"

"All My Alpaca is very popular," she says, which is true. Her vine followers love it, although she thinks that might just be because half of them are still Bellarke shippers, and even though Bob never appears in the videos, he posts enough weird alpaca pictures to his Twitter that everyone who cares has figured out they're his, and every new installment confirms the two of them are still hanging out. "I could quit acting, just do that full time."

"Stranger things have happened."

"I've got awards in a week."

"Which ones?"

"I don't even know. Stupid ones no one cares about?"

"That's all of them."

"You want to come?"

She sees him freeze, tension all up and down his back, and wonders why she thought it was a good idea. He's shown no indication of even thinking of coming back, no slight desire to be part of this world again. "Eliza," he says, careful.

"I need a date," she says, quick.

"You don't. Don't let anyone tell you that you need a man. You're an independent woman." He's trying to tease her, but he's still tense.

"I'd never try to make you come back," she says, before she can stop herself. "I hate that you think that's what I want."

"I don't," he protests. "Really." He rubs his face, like he's exhausted. "I didn't do this to make you all come to me, you know. That's not why. You don't have to."

"You never come to us, so--"

"That's where you're supposed to tell me you didn't think that," he says, but his smile is wry and understanding. He must get that it feels like that, sometimes. Like he's testing them and always expecting them to fail.

"It was just an idea," she says.

*

It becomes a thing after that; every few weeks, she'll tell him she has an event, and he should come. Most of the time she doesn't even have anything, it's just a constant reminder that there are other things in the world, and he's still welcome to them.

It's not like he never leaves the farm, of course. He probably leaves as much as he left his apartment when they were on the show together, but when they were filming together, she saw him all the time at work, and it didn't feel so--decisive. When he comes to her apartment to play games or hang out, it feels like he's just stopping by her world, on vacation, the same way it feels when she visits him.

It's not until she runs into Paige for the first time since they wrapped that she realizes, with a guilty start, how many people she _hasn't_ kept in touch with. She basically stopped talking to Thomas as soon as Finn got killed off, hasn't seen Lindsey in person for six months, although they keep up via social media and texting, grabbed lunch with Alycia when she was in LA and said she'd call, but didn't. Even Devon she doesn't see that much.

Mostly, she sees Bob, and people who will help her check in on Bob.

It's a jarring enough revelation that she goes and gets drunk with Christopher, and Devon, who happens to be in down, and she doesn't remember, in the cold light of day, _exactly_ what she said, but she's fairly sure it was long and embarrassing about about how Bob will just let them all leave him if they don't tell him they want him, and Devon might have filmed some of it. 

She's not _sure_ Devon filmed some of it until Ricky decides to get her drunk.

She and Ricky haven't ever been that close; she thinks of them as more co-captains of Bob's emotional defense force than as friends. Which doesn't mean she doesn't like him, it just means that it's suspicious when Ricky calls her up and says, "I'm in town, let's get drinks."

It's even more suspicious when Bob isn't there. _No one_ is there. She almost texts Marie, out of general panic, but--it's just _Ricky_.

"So, Bob," he says.

She measures her response, because--he's so casual, it feels like a trap. 

"Is he coming?" she asks, taking a sip of her drink.

Ricky just looks at her for a minute, and then wraps her up in his arms, which isn't really surprising. She is not convinced Ricky Whittle has ever met a problem he doesn't think he can hug his way out of.

"Have you told him? he asks.

"Told him what?"

"How you feel."

"Oh, god, no," she says. "It's too--there's too much, and so much of it is _stupid_. He didn't leave because of me, it's--I couldn't tell him it feels like that, because it's not. And I know why he doesn't come back. He's not doing any of it to me, so I'm not going to act like he is. I'm not telling him."

Ricky looks genuinely baffled. "No, I meant--how you _feel_." She shakes her head, blank, and he puts one hand over his chest, tapping out the rhythm of a heartbeat. "Love."

She finishes her drink and orders another one.

*

"You're a terrible influence," Bob observes.

"I'm going to teach her how to do it," she says, and rams her head into his arm again, so that Gladys will see how it's done. If the alpaca understands the demonstration, she shows no sign. "It's a very dramatic scene."

"Explain it to me again?" he says. His hair is getting shaggy, her favorite look for him. He feels more like the Bob she remembers, like _her_ version of himself. "She's jealous because--"

"Rogelio is in love with you, and she's in love with Rogelio. It's a love triangle. It's not a soap opera without a love triangle."

"Do people actually watch this?"

"Yeah! There's a tumblr and everything. Fuck Yeah, All My Alpaca. There's _fanart_."

That perks him up, of course; Bob _loves_ fanart. "Really?"

"Yeah. I'm expecting a real TV deal any day now." She butts her head against him again. "Seriously, Gladys?"

"What are the fans going to do when you move to LA?" he asks, with the least convincing nonchalance she has ever heard.

"You got a lot worse at acting since you quit. Who said I was moving to LA?"

"Marie. You had an audition, right? Leading role. Something good. I would have helped you run lines, if you told me."

"It's not going to happen," she says. "I just did it to make my agent happy. They want someone older. And I'd be miserable in LA, anyway. If I wanted to live in a hot desert full of weird things, I'd just go home." He snorts, and she can't help asking, "Why didn't you?"

"Why didn't I what?"

"Go home."

He looks at her, the sun is behind him, so she can't quite make everything out. "It didn't feel like that, I guess."

"What do you mean? Feel like what?"

"Like I would have been going home."

She headbutts him again, and Gladys tries to eat the button off her sleeve.

When she gets the offer for the LA job, she doesn't tell anyone, just turns it down, quietly, and tells her agent she wants to work in Vancouver.

*

The premiere for her indie thing is the first event she's actually cared about in a while, so she doesn't ask Bob to come. She doesn't mind so much when he turns her down for events that don't exist, or award shows she doesnt want to go to in the first place, but she's _proud_ of this. She'd want him to come with her so he could see it, be there with her for it, and if he said no, it would actually _hurt_ , and thinking about that makes her think about Ricky's horrific love pep-talk, which she's been trying to forget basically ever since it happened.

Because of course she loves Bob. Ricky loves Bob too. They all love him, right? There's no need to single her out.

But no one else thinks he belongs to them, right? Ricky's closest, but _everyone_ is Ricky's. Ricky knows all of Bob's alpacas' names because that's the kind of person he is. But Eliza knows their names because they're Bob's, and Bob cares about them for some reason, and she knows all their soap-opera names too, because she wants them to be hers in some way too. She wants to be a part of his life.

It doesn't have to be romantic, just like his being her plus-one to events she doesn't want to go to doesn't have to be romantic. But if it were, she wouldn't mind.

Marie's in LA, filming an action movie, and Lindsey moved back after the show ended, so she gets drinks with them and Ricky the night before the premiere. She doesn't get that drunk, but it doesn't take much alcohol to get her talking about the stupid premiere, and how proud she is, and she doesn't know how long she can go like this, pretending she doesn't mind if Bob hates this part of her life. She feels a little like an asshole, monopolizing the conversation, but Marie and Lindsey look like it's their own personal soap opera, and Ricky just hugs her and tells her, "All is love," which is either an indication he's drunk or just that he's Ricky.

"It's not a big deal," she says, and she really means it. "I just don't know how to make him understand I don't care if he never acts again, as long as he's happy. As long as I still see him."

Marie pets her on the shoulder. "Sleep is a good start. And water. Advil in the morning."

"I like his stupid alpacas," she says. "I've lost so many buttons, I don't even care."

"I know," says Marie, and pushes her into her cab.

*

It's not a big premiere or anything; this isn't a blockbuster. But it's a good movie, and she's proud of it. It's the kind of thing she wants to do--the things she loves. She wants to do the right projects, not the ones that will make her richest or most famous.

She wants to hang out in Vancouver and get some good TV gigs and make a movie now and then, and live on a fucking _farm_ when she has time off.

At least she finally knows exactly what she wants to be when she grows up.

She does the red carpet with Lucas Grabeel, who played her brother, whom she likes well enough. They have fun, and it's always cool, the cameras and the attention, all the questions. And, both being in the cast, she and Lucas won't start too many rumors.

Still, it's not--well, it's not what she would have picked. If it was up to her.

Bob's by the bar, in a tux, with messy hair and two drinks. He looks more nervous than she's seen in a while, and she's not quite convinced he's real until he says, "Ricky called."

"Fuck."

His mouth twitches. "That's how I feel when I see his number, too." Then he looks away. "If I'd known it mattered to you, I would have come."

It never used to be hard, getting him to do events with her. She'd say, I'm going to the Logies, or, I'm doing some weird con, I bet they'd take you too, and he'd just shrug and make it happen. She got used to being able to say she was going somewhere and knowing he's be with her.

"You never liked this stuff," she says. "And now you don't have to go."

"This part was the best part," he says, giving her one of his drinks and offering his arm.

"Which part? The part with the cameras or the part with the fan speculation or the part with--"

"The part with you," he says.

*

All My Alpaca episode 43, or "Eliza Taylor narrates Bob Morley getting head butted by a llama BELLARKE FUNNY!!" as the first YouTube rip titles it, goes viral. Ricky sends a link followed by about fifteen thousand heart-eye emoji, and even Christopher finds out about it, because he got kind of invested in the story when Devon showed him.

Eliza might have a future as a writer/director/alpaca farmer.

"It says alpaca _right there_ ," is Bob's take on it. "I'm not even getting publicity for Morley's Alpaca Yarn."

"Babe, I'm pretty sure anyone who's looking for Bellarke YouTube videos two years after the show ended already knows about your alpaca yarn."

"Still."

"Still," she agrees.

"You do have a bright future as an acting/directing/writing triple threat."

"And you can still bring in a crowd," she says without thinking, and nearly winces. They haven't talked about it at all, his leaving, what he thought it would mean for the two of them. It was so much better to just be with him, to not bother coming up with excuses to come out to the farm.

To wake up with him in the morning and go to sleep with him at night. Everything else seemed less pressing.

"I was thinking about trying out for a play."

"Yeah?"

He shrugs. "What's the worst that can happen? They turn me down?"

"That sounds really good for you."

"I thought so." He pauses. "You're not going to LA, are you?"

"No. I told my agent months ago. I'm staying here."

"In Vancouver?"

She squeezes his hand. " _Here_."

He smiles. "Here is good."


End file.
